The Next Foreign Secretary?

October's bright blue weather smiled on British Laborites as they met at Brighton for their annual conference last week. To the delegates, aglow with the latest poll, which showed 52% of the country's voters favoring Labor, their return to power seemed only a question of waiting for a general election (which Prime Minister Harold Macmillan understandably declared he has no intention of calling before 1960).

Day before, Aneurin Bevan, the man who will be Foreign Secretary in any new Labor government, laid down his views at a preconference rally. Bevan had just come back from a tour in which he met face to face with Khrushchev, Zhukov, Gomulka and other Soviet-bloc leaders. Nye seemed to have seen much good, observed little evil, and gained no wisdom.

In Poland and Russia, he proclaimed, "changes are taking place which if they are permitted to work themselves out will bring these nations into line with what we call the free people of the world." The Americans, he said, are "so blind that they do not understand that it is impossible to starve a modern revolution into surrender or submission. What I would say to my American friends is this -- if you are incensed by what you consider to be some of the more repugnant features of the Chinese or Russian regimes, the best thing to do with those nations is not to stand aloof or send them to Coventry; the best treatment is to bring them into closer relations with the rest of the world and make it easier for them to solve their economic and technical problems."

He had other observations. It was a "disaster for mankind" that Communist China has not been admitted to the U.N. He was not pleased with Konrad Adenauer, the friend of NATO, apostle of free enterprise and foe of Communism. "The government of Western Germany," blurted Nye, "is coming more and more under the same economic and financial influence which helped to create the Germany of Hitler." As for the Middle East: "We believe that it is absolutely nonsense to imagine you can maintain peace [there] without an arrangement to which Russia herself will be a contributor." He did not point out that this, in effect, is exactly Russia's own formula for bulling its way into the Middle East.

Any Laborite government, he assured his listeners, would work with Russia, China and any other country, whatever its political complexion. The U.S. might find it more difficult to work with the kind of Laborite government Nye Bevan envisions.

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